Premier League Shirt Sponsorships Transform This Season as 20-Year Gambling Sponsor Era Ends Under New UK Ban
Twenty years of gambling logos on Premier League shirt fronts are over. See which clubs found new sponsors and which are still searching.
Premier League shirts look noticeably different this season after clubs voluntarily voted to remove gambling companies from the front of matchday jerseys, ending a two-decade run of betting brands occupying the league’s most valuable advertising real estate. The ban, which takes effect for the 2026-27 campaign, makes the Premier League the first major sports league in the UK to adopt such a restriction on its own initiative.
The 20 clubs agreed to the move back in April 2023, with 18 in favor and two abstaining, following an extensive consultation with the Department for Culture, Media and Sport as part of the UK government’s broader review of gambling legislation. Clubs were given a three-season runway to unwind existing sponsorship agreements, and several waited until the deadline to finalize their replacements.
Why the Ban Only Goes So Far
The restriction is narrower than many fans realize. It applies strictly to the front of matchday shirts — gambling brands remain free to appear on shirt sleeves, training kits, and pitchside advertising boards. Critics, including some quoted in UK media coverage of the announcement, have called the policy “totally incoherent” for banning the most visible piece of branding while leaving other high-traffic advertising spots untouched.
For the past two seasons, 11 of the league’s 20 clubs carried some form of betting-industry branding on their shirt fronts, ranging from traditional online bookmakers to crypto casinos, some of which don’t even operate in the UK market. That number has now dropped to zero as the collective agreement takes hold.
Who Had to Find New Sponsors
Eight clubs needed replacement deals heading into this season: Aston Villa, Bournemouth, Brentford, Crystal Palace, Everton, Fulham, Nottingham Forest and Sunderland. Most moved quickly. Aston Villa partnered with Visit Rwanda, pairing the tourism deal with trade and investment ties. Bournemouth signed with Vitality, while Brentford simply promoted existing sleeve sponsor Indeed Recruitment to the front of the shirt.
Crystal Palace brought in Temporal, a software platform used for building large-scale applications, and Fulham struck a deal with data and technology firm ClickHouse — pushing the number of Premier League clubs with technology sponsors to four, alongside Manchester United and Ipswich. Everton replaced outgoing gambling sponsor Stake with CMC Markets, a global financial-services and trading platform, in a multi-year deal covering the men’s, women’s and under-21 sides.
Finance has emerged as the league’s leading sponsorship category this season, backing five of the 20 clubs. Nottingham Forest, Sunderland and Chelsea remain without a confirmed front-of-shirt partner as the season gets underway, leaving three of the league’s most historic clubs still searching for replacement revenue that the gambling ban wiped off the books.
The Money Clubs Are Leaving Behind
The financial stakes are significant. Industry estimates put the collective revenue shortfall from the ban at roughly £80 million annually across all 20 clubs — money that flowed in from betting operators eager for the exposure that comes with Premier League shirt-front placement. The Premier League has said it’s also working with other UK sports on a broader responsible-gambling sponsorship code, suggesting this shift could ripple beyond football and into how bookmakers approach sports betting partnerships across British sport more broadly.
Sportsbooks operating in regulated US markets, where front-of-shirt sponsorships aren’t restricted in the same way, will likely watch how this plays out. Books like DraftKings promo code offers continue to lean on jersey and stadium branding domestically even as UK regulators tighten the rules on gambling advertising in sport.
A Broader Shift in UK Sports Advertising
The Premier League’s move comes amid mounting pressure in the UK to curb gambling advertising’s visibility, particularly around youth audiences who watch matches in enormous numbers each week. Public health advocates have argued for years that having a betting company’s logo stitched across a club’s most-photographed piece of clothing normalizes wagering for younger fans who idolize the players wearing it. The league’s own statement framed the change as a voluntary step “to reduce gambling advertising,” language that signals awareness of that criticism even as sleeve and perimeter advertising remain untouched for now.
What happens next will depend largely on whether the remaining holdouts — Nottingham Forest, Sunderland and Chelsea — land agreements before the season progresses much further, and whether other British leagues follow the Premier League’s lead on their own sponsorship codes. For now, fans scanning the pitch each weekend will see a very different mix of logos than they did even one year ago, with fintech, airlines and tourism boards occupying space that betting brands controlled for two decades.